Quote:
Originally Posted by Legbreaker
Thanks. Just had a quick look so far but already saw some questionable targeting such as Richmond - it's C-130's and not much else. I lived and worked in and around it for a few years, it's just not worth nuking.
Meanwhile Williamtown at Newcastle where the majority of the F/A-18s were actually based (along with HQ and training) isn't on the list.
That said, by the time nukes were used, I'm fairly certain all Australia's combat air assets would have already been deployed.
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Definitely, those Hercs probably wouldn't all be at Richmond either, they would have been deployed northwards to assist with the operations in Papua New Guinea. Not all of them, but probably at least half of them would be away from base making Richmond even less attractive as a nuke target.
As for Williamtown, the majority of the Hornets would have been deployed to the various dispersal bases around the top end of Australia probably well in advance of any attack against Williamtown.
But as mentioned by Leg, the majority of Australian airpower would have already been damaged or destroyed beforehand. I'm inclined to believe that use of nuclear weapons against Australia would be more to deny base facilities (e.g. ports) to UK/US forces in the Indo-Pacific region. With that in mind, use against Australian military facilties would be limited to those bases that directly supported UK/US military operations.
As a potential (and very small) boost to the remaining military aircraft, it's possible the RAN (or even the RAAF) might take control of the half-dozen or so Grumman S-2 Trackers that were still in Australia. They had been retired in the mid 1980s and a small number were still in storage and awaiting disposal by the early 1990s. At that time there were still people in Australia with experience flying and servicing these aircraft (either still in RAN service, retired from the RAN or transferred to the RAAF).
But we are talking about three maybe four at most and they would probably be used as light bombers simply because there would be no ASW stores left for them to use (and more importantly, very few/no RAN vessels capable of supporting them in the ASW role).
A side note on those A-4 Skyhawks mentioned as being leased from New Zealand. They were used as OpFor for air force training as well as for land based air defence training.
Some of them were actually A-4G models that had been in service with the RAN fleet air arm and then sold to New Zealand (who upgraded them to A-4K standard).
In the early 2000s, the majority of the New Zealand Skyhawks were sold to a US company who also used them as aggressor aircraft.